I can imagine this scenario happening in Algol68 (or indeed any language), especially in the 1970s when memory was shared, unprotected and at a premium.
The scenario could have been a season batch job that corrupted some required shared memory.
But, Algol68 included four main aims and principles of design: Including Security: "Algol 68 has been designed in such a way that most syntactical and many other errors can be detected easily before they lead to calamitous results. Furthermore, the opportunities for making such errors are greatly restricted."
On the other hand, I did speak to an ICL engineer once, and he told a story of an ambitious ICL programmer adding a "Happy New Year" console to the Geroge OS (Written in Assembly language)
The ambitious ICL programmer decided it was too tough to test this one-off hack, and rolled out the OS update with his happy hack, untested.
The update seemed to run fine for a few months... Until months later (at New Year as it happens) all the ICL servers in New Zealand crashed, and two hours later all the ICL servers in East Coast Australia crashed.
This triggered a frantic call from the NZ ICL engineer to ICL in London England warning them of the impending doom in the UTC zone.
Yay... but this ICL Happy NY hack was probably written in ICL assembler.
Hmmm... It is interesting how many years urban myths can persist.... 45 years and counting....
"In December 1968 the report on the Algorithmic language ALGOL 68 was published. On 20–24 July 1970 a working conference was arranged by the IFIP to discuss the problems of implementation of the language,[1] a small team from the Royal Radar Establishment attended to present their compiler, written by I.F. Currie, Susan G. Bond[2] and J.D. Morrison. In the face of estimates of up to 100 man-years to implement the language, using up to 7 pass compilers they described how they had already implemented a one-pass compiler which was in production use in engineering and scientific applications."
The UK Defence Research Agency also produced http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten15 - Ten15 served as an intermediate language for various compilers, but with several unique features, some of which have still to see the light of day in everyday systems.
UK Defence Research Agency's ALGOL 68RS (algol68toc) is available from sourceforge, It now generates C.
The Algol68G interpreter has installers for for Windows, Fedora, Centos, RHEL, Ubuntu and Debian. And the source tarball will compile on Solaris, BSD and OSX etc.
Site also has stashed within the British DRA's (Defence Research Agency's) Algol68R compiler retooled to generate C. [as algol68toc] (DRA's compiler is actually written in Algol68!!)
The scenario could have been a season batch job that corrupted some required shared memory.
But, Algol68 included four main aims and principles of design: Including Security: "Algol 68 has been designed in such a way that most syntactical and many other errors can be detected easily before they lead to calamitous results. Furthermore, the opportunities for making such errors are greatly restricted."
On the other hand, I did speak to an ICL engineer once, and he told a story of an ambitious ICL programmer adding a "Happy New Year" console to the Geroge OS (Written in Assembly language)
The ambitious ICL programmer decided it was too tough to test this one-off hack, and rolled out the OS update with his happy hack, untested.
The update seemed to run fine for a few months... Until months later (at New Year as it happens) all the ICL servers in New Zealand crashed, and two hours later all the ICL servers in East Coast Australia crashed. This triggered a frantic call from the NZ ICL engineer to ICL in London England warning them of the impending doom in the UTC zone.
Yay... but this ICL Happy NY hack was probably written in ICL assembler.
On the other hand there was a nice little hack used by ICL in Algol68R that could be used today sniff out NULL pointer issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68-R#F00L